alt Hacker NewsFrom my perspective YouTube has quietly won the streaming wars. It has a vastly wider variety of content, especially for non-fiction shows. In the cases where there's more direct genre competition, I tend to prefer YouTube overall because, despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices". There's a lot of outright slop to wade through, ofc, but there's also a lot of creative risk taking out there to discover.
Meanwhile, yeah, Paramount, Time Warner, Disney, etc. have all become so money-minded and risk-averse that it reminds me of the twilight days of the old Hollywood studio system, where all the major production companies were locked into a heated battle to determine who could be the absolute blandest.
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I kind of agree, and it's interesting how Nebula and Spotify (at least their video efforts) have been based on elevating and funding those ultra-budget YouTube creators. Like I watch Lindsay Ellis and Practical Engineering and SkillUp all on non-YouTube platforms now, despite YouTube being the recommendation algorithm that originally brought me there.
It's really the opposite model of the "major" streaming players who fund tentpole releases in the conventional Hollywood way, and then have a long tail of niche content (cooking reality shows and the like) that are clearly on a much tighter budget, but still basically modeled on being a cheaper version of a cable show rather than a much better funded version of a YouTube comedy troupe.
> despite its offerings being generally lower budget, they tend to represent a wider variety of "editorial voices".
There's a huge amount of censorship with youtube though. The movies and shows on cable and streaming services can still talk about dead people without being forced to say they are "unalived". CNN can talk about a pandemic without calling it a "panini". Besides censoring specific words and phrases Youtube demonitizes entire genres of content along with anything that is "unfriendly" to advertisers. If that's the future of media in the US we're screwed.